As per my mathematical prediction in the previous post, this February is a mass graveyard for new year's resolutions. My friend who last January posted gym photos every day with the caption "new year new me", has now returned to his default mode: lying down playing ranked games until dawn while snacking on egg martabak.

Why did that happen? Let us discuss it more deeply through the lens of control systems and control theory.

Inside your brain, there is something called a feedback loop. When you first start your resolution (like an extreme diet), you feel excited because you are in the "honeymoon" phase. You see the scale go down a kilo in the first week, and that becomes positive feedback that gives you dopamine (reward). You feel your resolution is easy to achieve.

But, the laws of thermodynamics are cruel. Your body needs energy to maintain that drastic change. Entering the third week, you start feeling physically and mentally exhausted. Your weight starts stagnating (plateau). This is the critical point where positive feedback turns into negative feedback. Your brain starts sending danger signals: "Bro, our system lacks glucose, you better eat a heavy rice meal so our CPU can think to do assignments."

Because in the beginning you designed your resolution architecture using a greedy approach (wanting fast, extreme, and maximum results), you do not have mental buffers to deal with this negative feedback. Ultimately, you experience what is called a system failure. You cheat on your diet once, then feel like a complete failure, and eventually you keep cheating every single day.

I call this phenomenon "The All-or-Nothing Fallacy". This is equivalent to someone writing code with a try-catch block, but when there is a minor error, they immediately throw an exception and shut down the entire application. When they should have just logged that error, and continued running other unaffected functions.

So how do you refactor your resolutions so they do not crash in February next year?

First, use a PID Controller (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) system. Do not just rely on raw motivation that easily goes up and down. You have to be able to measure the deviation (error) between your target and your current position. If you fail your diet today, do not panic and reset all your progress. Just evaluate (derivative) why you failed, and set a compensation strategy (proportional) for the next day.

Second, lower your initial expectations to a Minimum Viable Habit (MVH). If you want to diligently read books, your initial target should not be finishing a book a week right away. Just target reading one page a day. It sounds lame, but this lowers your brain's cognitive resistance down to zero. One page is very easy to execute, and once you have opened the book, there is a high probability you will read more than one page.

Third, learn to accept the reality that your life is not a linear progression, but a sine and cosine function that will go up and down. Failing in February is not the end of the world. It is just an additional data point to train your model so it becomes more robust in March.

Stop blaming your weak motivation. Build an antifragile and iterative system.

Khay